1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to an image processing device and an image processing method and, more particularly, to an image processing device and an image processing method which effectively filter image noise.
2. Related Art
With highly development of display systems with multimedia display interfaces, image transmission technology and image broadcast technology are significantly progressing. As for image transmission technology, real-time image display becomes a popular display mode presently, which implements images that are captured by web cameras and are played at the display system immediately.
However, when the web camera or the display system (such as a liquid crystal display (LCD)) is used in an outdoor environment, an environment with insufficient backlight, or an environment with dim light source, the images are inevitably suffered from noise. Therefore, the images displayed at the display system may be greatly distorted and bad video quality is then provided.
In general, to improve the video quality, it is specific functional hardware components (such as an integrated circuit (IC)) that developers spend a lot of time and money to develop. Usually, developers dispose extra developed ICs in the web camera or the display system to rectify the images captured and to be displayed. The IC requires an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) performing an operation processing to filter the noise, a memory unit and a memory control circuit to store image in the operation processing.
The research and design for the ASIC and a manufacture process consume a lot of time and cost. Furthermore, the IC for processing the image requires specific cooperating memory units and memory control circuits, this leads to a far higher production cost, let along consumes a great deal of power as well.
Moreover, normally, the filtering or analyzing of the image noise is usually performed on a currently displayed image and a former image, via a non-linear computing operation. Thus, when it comes to filtering or analyzing mass of images, operation complexity is increased, but also the hardware loading is rising hastily, eventually reduce the efficiency of the system.